Light moves. Unless you spend all your time in an office with florescent lighting, the light around you shifts. The sun traverses the sky. Leaves on the trees blow in the wind and lend movement to dappled light. Shadows change.
When considering leaves and trees or clouds we must consider how they move. Abstract patterns have even more movement options available to them. And when the stage is filled with haze and fog, the movement of the light becomes quite a dynamic thing indeed.
Templates hold a degree of interest on their own but as static objects they can fast become, well, static. Motion gives life and vitality to templates that they might otherwise not have. If movement is required to create the right emotional environment then we must, as designers, be able to clearly and carefully select the best movement options available to us.
First up is rotation. Whether you are dealing with a template in a moving light with rotation ability, or a standalone fixture like the GAM TwinSpin or Rosco Double Gobo Rotator, rotation is a powerful tool for the lighting designer. Spinning templates can be a lot of fun for music events, bands, and the like. This is often what people first think of when they imagine a rotating template. However, rotating templates can have some powerfully subtile effects as well. Placing a static leaf or cloud pattern in a light with an abstract rotating template behind it can give a slight sense of movement without overpowering a composition. Getting the focus just right, such that the rotation recedes to the background, is critical in these cases.
Linear movement is another wonderful way to create motion with templates. Whether it is the vertical rise of flames or the slow horizontal shifting of clouds, linear motion, like that created by the GAM Film/FX, can be wonderful. These effects, like rotation effects, require a very careful attention to focus if you are trying to achieve any degree of subtlety. It is too easy to make these effects look like effects and not like an integrated part of a larger composition.
While discussing movement we should not overlook two very simple means of moving light around stage. First is lamp intensity. You may have subtle fades and builds of the light or a rapidly flickering disco effect, but either way, modulating the intensity of your templates is an easy way to give movement to them. The second kind of movement is a physical relocation of the beam of light. Typically achieved through the use of moving lights, this is another way to give dynamic movement to light. Then again, there is nothing like giving a baton of leaf templates a gentle shove to simulate a gust of wind.
Where things get really interesting is in how you combine these various qualities of movement. If you are lighting a dance floor, you might have your moving lights ballyhoo while rotating an abstract template with an intermittent strobe effect. But perhaps you are working on something more subtile, the night scene in an opera. You may have several GAM Film/FX slowly scrolling soft focused clouds across the sky while they subtly shift in intensity modulating up and down during the scene. Each choice may be the right one in the right context. But I have a hard time believing Mimi would look right with a strobing Technobeam overhead.
How you use and combine qualities of movement with templates will make the difference between an effect and a composition element. Carefully considering what quality of light you want will guide your design decisions and lead you to a solution that is more than just flickering dots bouncing around the stage.
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Hi Lucas. Do you have any clever ideas on how to create rotational or lineal gobo movement effects on a budget? I’ve been racking my brains but can’t come up with a lot…
Well, I suppose that all depends on what you mean by “on a budget.” There is the old hand puppet trick for creating flickering effects. Similarly you could find some interestingly shaped object and rotate it by hand. That’s about as low budget as I can think of. Otherwise I would look into the twinspin as they are typically rather inexpensive.